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Amos 'n' Andy is a sitcom set in Manhattan's historic black community of Harlem. The show was very popular in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s on both radio and television. The radio show was written and voiced by two white actors playing a number of different characters: the titular Amos Jones and Andrew Hogg Brown, George Stevens, better known as "The Kingfish," "Lightnin'", and many others. The number of characters portrayed by the two performers required not only their own vocal versatility, but compelled them to invent a number of innovative microphone techniques to help convey the illusion of multiple characters in the same space.
As the show came to television, black actors took over the overwhelming majority of the roles; white characters were infrequent. Although the television version in particular received some criticism even in its own time, it is notable that apart from a few of the regular characters, most of the characters portrayed are simply ordinary people, and not stereotypes. Even the Harlem neighborhood appears as any other normal American community: there are policemen, cab drivers, stores and shopkeepers, mothers with baby carriages, all going about their business in a perfectly unremarkable manner: they just happen to have black skin. Even "Amos" himself is a perfectly acceptable character, and no stereotype. He is a married man and an entrepreneur who owns and operates his own taxi business, the Fresh Air Cab Company. "Andy" is arguably more an unfortunate stereotype. He is chronically unemployed and a bit slow-witted. Despite his unemployment, he always seems to have a bit of money at hand, and one or two episodes suggest he has an adequate income from some stock holdings. "Kingfish" too is something of a stereotype going in the other direction, a clever, fast-talking huckster, always ready to cheat his friends with some get-rich-quick scheme. In this, though, Andy and the Kingfish are not so much black stereotypes as stock comic characters: they are very much in the mold of Abbott & Costello, with Andy as the naive,trusting Lou, always preyed upon by his unscrupulous friend.
What is also notable is that apart from the dialect, the scripts are remarkably un-suggestive of the characters' color. In one episode where Andy and the Kingfish have been misidentified as spies and a white factory owner is calling the police, all the viewer sees is the end of his telephone call and him making the statement, "That's their description."
Amos 'n' Andy began as one of the first radio comedy series, written and voiced by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and originating from station WMAQ in Chicago. After the program was first broadcast in 1928, it grew and became a hugely popular radio series. Early episodes were broadcast from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California.:168-71 The show ran as a nightly radio serial from 1928 until 1943, as a weekly situation comedy from 1943 until 1955, and as a nightly disc-jockey program from 1954 until 1960. A television adaptation ran on CBS-TV from 1951 until 1953, and continued in syndicated reruns from 1954 until 1966. It would not be seen to a nationwide audience again until 2012.
Amos 'n' Andy creators Gosden and Correll were white actors familiar with minstrel traditions. They met in Durham, North Carolina, in 1920. Both men had some scattered experience in radio, but it was not until 1925 that the two appeared on Chicago's WQJ. Their appearances soon led to a regular schedule on another Chicago radio station, WEBH, where their only compensation was a free meal. The pair's hopes were that the radio exposure would lead to stage work; they were able to sell some of their works to local bandleader Paul Ash which brought them enough name recognition to be offered jobs at the Chicago Tribune's station WGN in 1925. The offer was steady and lucrative enough to allow them to now become full-time broadcasters. The Victor Talking Machine Company was also interested enough to offer them a recording contract.
Since the Tribune syndicated Sidney Smith's popular comic strip The Gumps, which had successfully introduced the concept of daily continuity, WGN executive Ben McCanna thought a serialized version would work on radio. He suggested that Gosden and Correll adapt The Gumps for radio. The idea seemed to involve more risk than either Gosden or Correll was willing to take; neither was adept at imitating female voices, which would have been necessary for The Gumps. They were also conscious of having made names for themselves with their previous act. By playing the roles of characters doing dialect, they would be able to conceal their identities enough to be able to return to their old pattern of entertaining if the radio show was a failure.
Instead, they proposed a series about "a couple of colored characters" but borrowing certain elements of The Gumps. Their new show, called Sam 'n' Henry, began on January 12, 1926, and fascinated radio listeners throughout the Midwest. It became so popular that in 1927 Gosden and Correll requested it be distributed to other stations on phonograph records in a "chainless chain" concept that would have been the first radio syndication. When WGN rejected the proposal, Gosden and Correll quit the show and the station (their last musical program for WGN was announced in the Chicago Daily Tribune of January 29, 1928). Episodes of Sam 'n' Henry continued to be aired until July 14, 1928. Contractually, Correll and Gosden's characters belonged to WGN, so when they left WGN, they performed in personal appearances but could not use the character names from the radio show.
WMAQ, the Chicago Daily News station, hired Gosden and Correll and their former WGN announcer, Bill Hay, to create a series similar to Sam 'n' Henry. They offered higher salaries than WGN and the right to pursue the "chainless chain" syndication idea. The creators later said they named the characters Amos and Andy after hearing two elderly African-Americans greet each other by those names in a Chicago elevator. Amos 'n' Andy began on March 19, 1928 on WMAQ, and prior to airing each program they recorded their show on 78 rpm disks at Marsh Laboratories, operated by electrical recording pioneer Orlando R. Marsh. Early 1930s broadcasts of the show were done from the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, California.
For the program's entire run as a nightly serial, Gosden and Correll portrayed all the male roles, performing over 170 distinct voice characterizations in the show's first decade. With the episodic drama and suspense heightened by cliffhanger endings, Amos 'n' Andy reached an ever-expanding radio audience. It was the first radio program to be distributed by syndication in the United States, and by the end of the syndicated run in August 1929, at least 70 stations besides WMAQ carried the program by means of recordings.
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